One is the pictographic representation of Chinese characters. Seal script is a font that still retains hieroglyphics. The calligraphy of seal script pursues a pictographic beauty, a quaint taste and an ancient meaning. Seal script has long lost its practical function. Now people who write seal script are mainly for artistic appreciation, so that most people don't know seal script. "Yang Naiwu and Chinese Cabbage" tells the story of Juren Yang Naiwu who was punished in Yuhang County, but confessed and signed a pledge, and was sentenced to death. Later, the people concerned were deported to Beijing, and the case was retried in the lobby of the punishments department. The presiding judge asked Yuhang magistrate how to hear the verdict, and the magistrate replied that Yang confessed himself and had pictures to prove it. The presiding judge took out the confession and asked the magistrate to look at Yang's picturesque confession. The magistrate said, "a ball of ink." The presiding judge shouted: "It's obviously the word' bullying' in tadpoles!" The magistrate of a county was blindsided. It turns out that Yang wrote ancient Chinese characters that he didn't know.
The second is the character's stroke performance. Li, Kai, Xing and Cao have lost hieroglyphics and have abstract glyphs. Their calligraphy pursues the beauty of an image, paying attention to the harmony and symmetry of the structure of words and the strength and stretching of strokes. Zhang Xu, a calligrapher in the Tang Dynasty, said, "Look at Dan Fu's struggle for Tao's meaning, and look at the sword's spirit.". Carriers crisscross the path, showing a scene of miscellaneous but not chaotic, crowded and giving way, which can be related to the layout of the word, neither congested nor discrete. The heroic posture of sword dance can be related to the coherent echo and continuous flying between strokes.
People think that calligraphy is an art from the Han Dynasty. Before the Han Dynasty, although Oracle Bone Inscriptions and epigraphy were objectively beautiful, people's attention was not subjectively in this respect. Just like the ancients didn't care much about how beautiful the surrounding environment was when they were fishing and hunting. Up to now, the earliest recorded calligraphy appreciation was in the early Han Dynasty. Prime Minister Xiao He wrote "Black Dragon" and "White Tiger" for the palace gate, which attracted thousands of people to watch, which should be the beginning of calligraphy appreciation.
With the subjective understanding of beauty, people gradually integrate the aesthetic things in life into calligraphy and strive to develop the beauty of calligraphy. Just as all kinds of characters written by writers have distinct characteristics, the characters written by calligraphers are graceful and charming, dancing with the wind. Why do some people feel refreshed when they see a calligraphy work? This is the image appeal of calligraphy art.
The evolution of Chinese characters and calligraphy just illustrates the whole process of scientific invention and application of achievements. Scientific research also begins with images and draws abstract laws. Newton discovered the law of gravity by observing apples falling from trees. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy by bathing. Einstein found that the theory of relativity also started with images. At first, he imagined what it would be like to follow the light at a fast speed. The application of scientific theorems is a process from abstract to concrete, that is, a visual process. When mechanics is applied to buildings, buildings are created, when mechanics is applied to machinery, motor vehicles are created, and when mechanics is applied to geology, gable structures are found. Through the above discussion, we can outline a trajectory in the process of creation; Image is an abstraction and an image. Every step and point in this process can achieve corresponding achievements, which is a valuable inspiration from China's calligraphy.
Calligraphy is a treasure of China culture, and the research on calligraphy has become more and more perfect. The appreciation of calligraphy art is multifaceted, multi-angle and multi-level. The following mainly discusses several issues from the perspective of the correlation between science and art.